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Travelogue: The Imperial Capital

Yesterday, my duties required me to go into the Imperial Capital for meetings. Not being a Cloud Person, and living among the Dirt People, it means I have to drive into the city, which is one of the worst things that can be asked of a man. Traffic around the Capital is some of the worst on the planet. I think I’d rather ride a scooter in Tijuana than drive around Washington DC. But, when duty calls you do what you must and that meant two hours of car time navigating the traffic of the capital.

One of the things you notice upon entering the capital area, if you are the noticing type, is the wealth. Sitting in traffic, I looked at the cars around me and I spied an Audi A8 to my left, a Mercedes S-class in front and a Tesla to my right. That was roughly a quarter million dollars within arms length of me. Looking around, I saw lots of other luxury cars. For the managerial elite, Audi and Mercedes are the safe choices so you see a lot of them. Lexus is another solid choice as their cars are well appointed, without being ostentatious.

The Imperial Capital is the richest place on the planet, which makes a lot of sense, given that it is the capital of the empire. Half of the ten richest counties in America are around Washington DC. The reason for that is the people living in those counties either work for the government or they work for companies that have one customer – the Federal government. The average Federal salary is something north of $80,000 per year, while the average American salary is about $50,000. That’s before figuring in the lavish government benefits.

Of course, the people living in the capital area don’t think of themselves as rich. One of the stranger things about the managerial class is they combine a sense of entitlement with the firm belief they are up against it. Federal employees are hilarious when they start moaning about how tough it is for them in the bureaucracy. From their perspective, they are not wrong. Government workers spend their days in pointless busy work. Anything resembling useful work is thwarted by a bureaucracy that has evolved to serve its own interests.

The shadow bureaucracy, the army of private sector contractors that work exclusively for the Federal government have a slightly different view of things. They actually have to fulfill the terms of a contract so there is a culture that somewhat resembles the dreaded private sector. Even so, fulfilling the contract often just means showing up for meetings and conference calls, where the only thing discussed is the next meeting or conference call. I know someone whose only job is to arrange conference calls for the staff of her firm. She drives a BMW.

I’ve often suspected that the urge for self-actualization among managerial class types stems from the fact that at some level, they know their work is meaningless. Anyone who has had the pleasure of working the business end of a shovel knows the strange pleasure that comes from seeing a hole in the ground that you created. There’s a pleasure in work that comes from seeing the results of your labors. It’s why Donald Trump seems so weird as a politician. Unlike the rest of them, he can point to a building with his name on it and say, “I made that.”

In the Imperial Capital, no one can say they made anything since all of them are just gears in the giant machine we call the state. The Federal government does a lot and the results are everywhere, but no one person can connect his labor to any one thing. Worse yet, most everyone thinks the government does more harm than good. Even the people in the system generally despise the fruits of their labors, what little there are. It’s not as bad as being a guard at a labor camp, but it is hard going to work every day knowing you’re either unessential or a nuisance.

The result of this is the people in the managerial elite, government division, do not identify themselves by their work. A computer programmer will tell you he is a programmer in the first few minutes you meet him. A plumber or school teacher will identify themselves by their trade. Government workers tell you about the hobbies and their passions. A gal yesterday spent fifteen minutes telling me about her passions, before finally getting around to mentioning she was an administrator for a government agency.

The other thing that warps the culture and the people of the Imperial Capital is the near total lack of risk. There’s crime, of course, but that is mostly avoidable. The violence in DC is in the remaining black ghettos, which are slowing being exported beyond the beltway into unsuspecting neighborhoods in the suburbs. The thing that is missing is economic risk. No matter what is happening in the economy, it is always good times in the Imperial Capital. They have not had a recession in over 70 years.

The fact is, it is just about impossible to be fired from a government job. More people die in their government jobs than get fired. No one ever quits, because there is no better place to work. Imagine if your employer gave you a 30% raise and tenure, meaning you can now come to work naked if you choose. That’s life in the Federal bureaucracy. All those days off, I suspect, are so the Federal workforce can have time to build interesting and self-actualizing lives outside of work. Otherwise, days and weeks of pointless tedium would result in a mass insanity or something similar to a prison riot.

Roll it all up and you have a world inside the Capital and the world outside. Something similar can be seen in New York or London with the financial class. The difference there is they actually do things, other than stop people from doing things. Hollywood has a similar culture. They call Washington “Hollywood for ugly people” for that reason. In both cases, tens of thousands live well doing no discernible work. Their value is in the fact they know how the system works or they are a gear in some portion of it that has been deemed essential.

It’s easy to see why Mao sent these people off to the rice paddies in the Cultural Revolution. If one is of the revolutionary mind, you cannot help but look at the managerial class as an occupying force, a foreign colonial bureaucracy. It’s not that they are bad or evil. It’s that they are so foreign and detached. Walk onto an elite college campus and you, as a Dirt Person, feel as if you are in a foreign country. Spend time in the Imperial Capital and you get some sense of what it was like to be a Hindu during the British Raj.

I had to laugh after reading your post. I had just finished submitting a monthly hours and wages report to the U.S. Dept. of Labor for my employer. A cadre of Government clerks will gather and consolidate this same date from a variety of American businesses and produce an extremely detailed report in full color on a very nice bond paper. The report has no discernible purpose, will be read by nobody, and trashed upon receipt.

Not so fast, Dan: I think the no doubt excellent report from your information will be filed away. In my experience nothing was ever thrown away, because otherwise there would be no filing cabinets. Back when I did some teaching, there was a small, locked room no one went in. That was where all the students’ course papers from the past ten years were stored. They were saved in case anyone ever asked about them, but no one asked. When we came to filing away year eleven, it was hard finding space in the bulging cabinets. I have to admit… Read more »

About those luxury cars, that sounds like our suburban neighborhood, Southern California. Somewhat East of Hong Kong and Beijing. The local Mercedes dealer is in fat city – every Chinese woman has a Mercedes – black or white. The men drive bigger models. Every Chinese kid gets a BMW or a Lexus for high school graduation. Teslas all over the place! Maseratis! Ferraris! In multiples!!!! (And we are nowhere near Hollywood.) They are terrible drivers. Does it hurt less to be hit by a fancy car?

Great observations, acute perspectives, and keen insights, as usual. In any good narrative, it is the anticipation of the ultimate denouement that keeps one engaged. So, personally, in any given piece, I am always looking for the “money shot”. Very often, with the Z-man, it happens in the final sentence and this is when I get all like: “DAMN! Put a bough on that sucker and hand me a cigar.”

I know someone who quit a government job. It was quit, go crazy or blow up the place. Her military service was vilified, by people who had none. She was berated because she worked – at her job description and improving relations with the non-government companies involved in the agency, hours above and beyond. When she told a supervisor a report going forward was filled with incorrect information and needed overhaul, she was told to shut up. Supervisors in various categories were paid a bonus based on meeting a calendar deadline, and to fix the report would mean missing the… Read more »

I seem to recall us calling govt cogs “Mandarins” at some point. We need to revive it. They don’t actually wear jeweled fingernail sheathes and write eight-legged essays on the finer points of the Tao, but functionally it’s the same thing. When I’m dictator, one of my first fuhrer orders will be non-transferrable term limits on government employment — you get five years on the tit in any capacity, then you’re done. Contractors shall have compliance officers whose sole job is to make sure any former govt employee hired by their firm gets nowhere near that line of business, violations… Read more »

@ Severian – I don’t mind if a government employee can hold a job for 30-40 years and retire. Why shouldn’t they be entitled to full time employment and benefits like anyone else? What I would do is simply limit their salary based on the type of work they do and only give them pay raises equal to the cost of living increase. I don’t really see the point of retraining someone every five years. High turn-over rates are expensive and not very productive. The lady at my local grocery store has been working there for over 23-years. Why shouldn’t… Read more »

@ Karl Horst, the high cost of high turnover is the best argument for simplifying government procedures to the point where very little training is required. It’s the same argument for term limits on Congressmen — if you simplify the government to the point where teaching someone to do it is easy, that government is by definition limited and transparent. I’m sneaky that way. 🙂 But I’d be ok with no term limits if you don’t get to vote while on the govt it. I totally agree about the trebuchets, though, and hereby invite you to serve as Commissioner of… Read more »

A high turnover rate would be a good thing amongst useless pests. We would just have to make do with less busybody interference. Those in useful positions, providing the actual legitimate functions of govt. could be exempt – protect the borders, emergency services, police, inspector generals….

For someone who drinks of a right wing site, your understanding of the bureaucratic DNA is shockingly low. Then I remembered Hayek writing words to the effect that Germans might be the only people naturally suited to a socialist-bureaucratic society that was not self-immolating; that all people were drawn to it by instinct but that only Germans could survive it.

@ Joe and James Wilson – “The federal government employs approximately 2.1 million workers plus 700,000 Postal employees. The U.S. Government is the largest employer in the United States, hiring over 2% of the nation’s work force. The average annual salary for full-time federal job holders exceeds $81,258. The federal sector hired 232,812 federal employees nationwide and overseas in 2015. Almost a third were veterans.” * When you outsource all your factories to Mexico, South America and China, and don’t provide retraining or proper education or apprentice programs for your veterans and young people who aren’t college bound, this suddenly… Read more »

It used to be that the government employee received a lower wage proportionally with some decent benefits. They also received cost of living raises tagged to the inflation rate. Then costs in the locus of DC and other spots got high. That caused the cost of Gov’t employment to go up along with the cost of the benefit packages. Then they got the idea they should be paid more than the productive members of society. The managerial classes lost the sense they were servants of the rest of us. Back then the retirement packages were really good because of being… Read more »

You are far too kind. I would immediately put all of them on part time, ~20 hrs/wk, and eliminate benefits for part timers. Half of 80k per year year is 40k – nearly the average of private sector WORKERS. If govt. workers are not quitting their jobs at the same rate as private sector workers their wages would be adjusted downward, starting with the top tiers. At the very least, the Pendleton act of 1883 must go. It was intended to prevent political hacks running govt., but has cemented hacks of only one side in place – the more govt.… Read more »

Zmans post is a perfect example of why the constitution must be amended to prohibit the federal govt. from exacting any taxes, fees or tariffs from any state, individual , corporation or entity. Each state legislature should be empowered to decide how much of their citizen’s money they will sent off to the federal govt. and the amount they send should be solely at the discretion of each state legislature. This is the only way to dismantle the tyrannical , unaccountable govt. bureaucracy and to prevent the rebirth of this parasitic leviathan. Just like the elitist parasites that rule the… Read more »

I’d allow only sales tax and import duties, and any sales of bonds(for emergencies) should be matched by an immediate increase in the sales tax rate – calculated to pay off the debt before most current voters retire. I think people would be AMAZED and angry at how high that sales tax would have to be, to maintain current levels of spending. But , if we quit our foolish “wars”, we’d be in a much more “sustainable” position: – War on poverty – our social safety net should be a barracks, with rice and beans diet – anything more will… Read more »

@ Joe – Americans have a very different idea of fighting wars today than they did 80-years ago. Out with c-rations and mobile kitchens and in with Burger King in combat areas. When Napoleon said “an army travels on its stomach”…I’m pretty sure he didn’t have Pizza Hut in mind. But you’re right. Sixteen years of war…sixteen…against people running around in robes and tennis shoes. Something is not right about that, given you defeated the technically advanced German war machine in less than four years. While I support your troops and the brave young people who server your country and… Read more »

I am a combat veteran of Afghanistan and I would like to clear some of your notions. The infantry (my experience) did not have anything close to pizza hut, no internet either. It was MREs and whatever food we could scrounge up from the locals every now and then. Those amenities are found in the bigger logistical bases, I wasn’t living much differently from the villagers around me. I agree that 16 years of war for what we have achieved is an outrage. That’s because of very strict rules of engagement, and probably something deeper at a civilizational level, where… Read more »

@ Anonymous Bro – In my eyes, a military base represents occupation by the force that won after the war is over, as US bases exist in Germany today, in order to establish a controlling presence. As you say about rules of engagement, it would seem these rules are not helping the average soldier or the greater strategic goals. American military soldiers I have had the pleasure to know are generally well education, highly skilled and very well trained. But we had seen in the past various reports where young men in depressed economic areas joined out of financial need… Read more »

It is no accident that the personal income tax is taken automatically from each paycheck; people generally don’t think twice about it.
Congress did this intentionally to “fool” the public.
They just as easily could have decided that everybody pays what they owe at the end of the year.
This of course would cause riots.

Allowing politicians to tax is just an open door to abuse, corruption, waste and fraud.
If the states, and states only were allowed to impose an income tax, the people could at least have the option to move to a more tax friendly (i.e., economic growth friendly) state/

The safety net should be commodities. That’s what they used to get. And indians (feather not dot) still get them. They came with a little cookbook to tell you how to use the stuff. They went to food stamps and SNAP to allow graft for the grocers.

And I agree on military wars. If we don’t have an agreed on goal and an idea of how to get out of it, we should not go in.

Federal bureaucrats! Friend, you have no idea what they are like at the state level.Very short version of an 8 year story. I have riverfront property with a dock that has been there since at least the 70s. DNR would not renew the lease with the previous owner (they did not want it as a recreational dock.) DNR wants the dock removed, even though the road will likely be washed out from ship surges that come up the river. (This has happened at another spot in the road that is permanently closed.) Court tied themselves in knots doing whatever the… Read more »

Beemers and Mercedes are the common car around here for the apparatchiks (the illegals drive beat up Hondas and Toyotas). There are also thriving Maserati and Jaguar dealerships to serve the Imperial City. The path to wealth, assuming you can’t swing a foundation like the Clintons, is to rise up in a government job to GS-14 or 15 then jump to industry, move up there while making political connections, then jump back to the Government as an SES. These are the people who have the nice vacation properties on the Eastern shore and the Shenandoah valley.

From your description, Washington D.C. sounds a lot like the Bay Area and Silicon Valley back in the 80’s and 90’s. Companies like Applied Materials, eBay, Adobe, Cisco and dozens of dot coms on the up and up. The 101 and 280 were bumper to bumper at rush hour with BMW’s, Mercedes, and Porsche’s. Not to mention the million dollar homes in Palo Alto, Los Gatos and Aptos.. If you ever have dinner on a sidewalk restaurant in downtown Palo Alto, you’ll watch a couple million dollars cruise by every five minutes. But of you looked out into the parking… Read more »

I went to high school in Mountain View, pre-Silicon Valley. (Steve Job’s parents moved to a different area, so he wouldn’t have to go to my school.) I consider the tech companies to be the worst blight on a state you can ever have. Normally, corporations would tend towards the conservative side. Tech companies are the worst sort of liberals imaginable. Every state they infect winds up with a wealthy class and a peon class. WA state is well on the way to being just like CA.

I did most of my stint at HP. Gotta love Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett. True gentlemen, businessmen and scholars. What attracted me to HP was their dedication to making the best products for their markets. Great values in how they ran the company. And somehow, despite all the brilliant people that were hired, when the company got into trouble, Dave would come back and “find and fix” the problem, usually a business problem like inventory. Seems to be a great shift in Valley values happened after the dot com bust. Companies after that were just in the mode of… Read more »

@ notsothoreau – From a historical perspective, workers in American industry at the turn of the century were horribly treated by their robber baron masters. It took a long time before you had anything like unions to protect workers from management elites. Let us not forget men like J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew W. Mellon, and John D. Rockefeller who got rich on the backs of abused men and women. Heavy industry was more of a blight on the people and the land than any tech company today. In America and Europe today, no tech company is responsible for workers… Read more »

Karl- industrial jobs at the turn of the 20th century were no picnics, to be sure. I think though, that to the people of the time they represented a significant improvement in their lives. None of us would want to work in a meat packing house or a steel mill in 1905. Factories were dirty and dangerous places. But- the world at that time was a dirtier and more dangerous place. Even back in my youthful commie days I thought that there was a flaw in the “Robber Baron” meme. These guys were not always Angels, but they have largely… Read more »

When the title said “Travelogue”, I wondered for a minute whether you had yet to return across the Atlantic, and that the Imperial Capital spoken of might be Brussels. Apart from the details of the vibrant parts of the city, I’m not sure there’d be much difference in the description.

We can also generalise to “Politics is show-biz for ugly people”, up to and including the anomalous number of homosexualists and other deviants in each “profession”.

To be a dirt person is to have created something through labor, something tangible, creation of intrinsic value. The entire cause of revolution against King George and the Tory’s was the cause of unfettered economic freedom. The act of producing something without the unrighteous, unholy burden of having some portion of the fruits of your labor taken from you to be divvied up among people who produce nothing of intrinsic or tangible worth. It is theft plain and simple. There is a deeply profound line in the Declaration of independence: ‘He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent… Read more »

We can start by removing every firearm, every bullet, every piece of military equipment from any Federal bureaucracy. If they need firepower, they can request help from the local police. They want gun control? Fine, let’s give it to them. I don’t want to hear any more about a Department of Education SWAT team coming for someone that is behind in their student loan payments.

The military grade armaments, and the mentality which employs those weapons of war upon the civilian populous literally and figuratively are a symptom of the crux of the “fundamental transformation” of amerika. It is as Thomas Jefferson once said: A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take everything you have. Collectivism, globalism, communism, democracy, socialism, pregressivenism, same shit different names, is the appetite of a self-appointed ‘elite’ for other people’s liberty, property and lives. The federal government has become nexus of the ultimate entitlement class, the class of Americans who believe they are… Read more »

Jefferson said it, Ford could have. Don’t know. What makes you suggest the tyranny of King George or the specter of future human behavior and actions is any different from Jefferson’s time onwards, than it is in ours? The tyranny of the day is relative friend. Jefferson’s was no more or no less terrible than what I am personally confronted with today, it is just simply relative. Wouldn’t you say? To put a finer point on it, how is a little bit of slavery OK? Would it not be valid to ask how is just a little bit of tyranny… Read more »

There are gov’t jobs in my state agency that are so horrible the turnover rate is 50%, but that’s all the young blood who are sure they weren’t born to torment people that way. Today’s fresh Hell was in the form of yet another bureaucrat above me who has been promoted beyond her abilities (the turnover rate creates lots of these folks higher up). She is a dear, and tries to be helpful, but has hit the wall. She can’t get her mind around the fact that a vendor can be working for the State under two different contracts, for… Read more »

Good article. Minor correction to assertion that there hasn’t been a recession in fed gov’t in DC in 70 years. There was one during the early Eisenhower years, complete with layoffs. Federal jobs were less well paid than private at that time and slowly gained over the private sector, then quickly – until the ridiculous present.

I worked briefly for the federal government as a bridge job. I couldn’t stand the uselessness and pointlessness of it. I had maybe 3 days of real work a month. I left after about 14 months for a private sector job. As I was leaving, one of the managers told me he didn’t need 80% of his people, but I could come back if I ever wanted to. I don’t see how these people can spend their entire lives doing nothing. They’re better off gargling buckshot. I agree with everything else in your post. I have to travel to Mordor… Read more »

When I finished college in mid-70’s, there was a recession and jobs were tough to come by. I lucked out and got one at a government contractor. You know, the big kind with “cost plus” contracts where profits were guaranteed. When budget time came, we had to work overtime to spend the current budget in order to justify a larger budget for the next year. Those kinds of things were at play including having a union for technicians. So as an engineer, I could not “touch” any equipment. I had to instruct the technicians on what to to. This after… Read more »

I recently moved to Fairfax County to work an assignment at the Pentagon. My wife and I are still in shock at the cost of living and the level of wealth inhabiting this area – strikingly different than the rest of the country. I met a civilian employee at the Pentagon who is a secretary. She’s not even a good secretary. She was recently asked to order some supplies and this request sent her home in a panic attack. She is a GS-14!!! This puts her salary somewhere between $87,263 and $113,444. This woman shows up to work, does next… Read more »

First, this blog post represents the most accurate description of DC I’ve ever read. It is entirely accurate. Charles Murray is exactly right in describing the (rich) DC suburbs as a land wholly cut off from the rest of the country. I just finished 2+ years in the Pentagon, working in an office of mostly sand crabs, a mix of GS and contractors, along with two military officers. I arrived in DC knowing that it wouldn’t be easy, but I was stunned at the level of affluence, coupled with the sheer number of oxygen thieves. Before DC I had never… Read more »

It’s not that they are bad or evil. But it is, and they are. And, even worse, that many of them can know this and feel no self-loathing, or at least shame. Taking money to produce nothing is theft. How anyone with a sense of self-worth can do this for a month is beyond me, but for 30 years? To me, that puts you in the company of, as Arlo Guthrie said, ” mother stabbers and father rapers. ” Knowing that the money you take comes from friends and family members should mean that no one works in DC at… Read more »

I did a freelance photography job once, for a Federal Department of Social Services. Simple thing, a photo of a child for the front page of a short pamphlet. The subject was…I can no longer remember. The child is in college now. The pamphlet hasn’t been released, yet. I spoke once to the lady that had me take the photo (also the childs mother) and I asked her way the project was canceled. “It wasn’t”, she said. “It was still winding it’s way through the process.” So far this has taken three times longer than the construction of Hoover Dam.… Read more »

I was in DC a couple years ago for a couple days; and this fits the bill. The structures are beautiful (though rather undersized; the Washington Monument is by far the most notable part of the city), the traffic heavy, the suburbs leafy, and the people rich. Construction is still going on around the outskirts of the city and confidence in the economy is the highest in the country. It’s the Hillbot managerial-class dream come alive.

Today most government workers are emotionally and politically similar to NGO types. They believe, or pretend to, that they are on a mission to change the world. They vote Democrat. They have sensitivity training sessions to make sure there are no heretics. They are preoccupied with deviations from the unnatural order they want to maintain. A good example is the obsession with bicycles. They want to curtail fossil fuel use because of global warming. So, riding a bike to work is an act of faith. Unfortunately, they are always getting hit by cars because DC isn’t Amsterdam. The idea of… Read more »